Artist Statement:
UNDER WESTERN SKIES
Some Eastern Approaches by Caroline Hunter

For me, a good painting is nearly always achieved in a steady flow of concentrated work. I am calm and completely absorbed without real thought of an end point, just attending to each aspect of the painting as it unfolds. If it works the painting can achieve a timelessness and quiet dignity and has that quality like some pieces of music (and some cakes) whereby it could not be imagined that any element could be otherwise. It is quietly perfect and one feels it has always existed - the artist has simply revealed it.

This kind of work comes, in my case, only occasionally. But when it does it is often when hope of great things has been given up, when I am tired, hung over, slightly ill, fatigued or lacking in energy. I stop trying to force the outcome and try to surf on the back of what emerges.

On one occasion I was painting a hazel twig in a glass of water in a desultory way on a dreary Friday afternoon and became so absorbed that I felt my body was in the room above the studio and I was reaching down into my studio to paint. (This is why it is important not to burst in on painters and ask them if you are disturbing them and then ask how it is going and say would they like a cup of something and would they like anything from the shop.).

My starting point is often a glimpsed chord of colours: a rusting shed roof against grey hills, bleached grasses next to blue-green bosky woods, a ginger cow with a lilac and yellow sky, hot orange nasturtiums entangled in dirty-green runner beans on a grey afternoon. Through successive layers, I work around the painting trying out different approaches and motifs, sometimes scrubbing hours of work off at the sink, leaving the painting looking like its been washed up on the shore, adding glazes, scratching through layers, until the resulting work has sculpted itself into something complete. My compass to guide this process is very much a gut feeling or a reaction to what is emerging. Often I get lost and simply have to put the work aside or cast about until I hit on an approach that finds a response. When I find my way again it's a huge relief, though often tentative at first, soon characterised by renewed energy and excitement.

A trained painter might create works that are technically enthralling, but emotively dead. The poetry of a painting comes from somewhere further away where we have little control except to open it up and let it breathe. It can be a lifetime's process to take one's work seriously but lightly. To stop trying so hard; to put one's skills completely at the service of the quiet visions that come from waiting and listening. To get out of the way of one's work.